Google plans to make YouTube into something far more than just a website for small video clips with relatively low resolution. As a step towards this, the company has gradually enhanced, therefore the possibility to upload and publish larger video files with much higher resolution. In December last year it became possible to upload and play videos in full HD resolution (1080p). On Friday the company took another step, namely 4K.
With support for 4K, it is now possible to upload videos with resolutions up to 4096 x 2304 pixels to YouTube. This is more than four times as many pixels per frame as the full-HD delivers.
In a blog post writing YouTube technician Ramesh Sarukkai the videos with the resolution entails some limitations.
- Video cameras that can shoot in 4K is not cheap, and projectors that can display video in 4K is typically the size of small refrigerators. Moreover, it will require super-fast broadband to watch these videos, write Sarukkai.
To see the video with higher resolution than 1080p. can the player choose "Original" on the menu for the resolution. This will display the video at full resolution.
There is already a handful of videos with 4K resolution at YouTube. These are collected here.
For users who want to upload so big files, it may be necessary to use YouTube's Java based upload client. It supports files larger than 2 gigabytes and have the opportunity to continue uploading after an interruption. But still, the maximum length of the videos from ordinary users set to be 10 minutes.
